A Retrospective on Building Out a Physical Product For the First Time With No Prior Experience

I’m a recovering architectural/urban designer conquering the UX world one pixel at a time. I design experiences and strategies, big to small, at the intersection of people, culture and the environment. You’ll usually find me learning a new skill, questioning my biases or asking too many questions.

I recently got my hands dirty rolling out the first functional pilot of an outdoor air quality and social distancing monitoring system. This wasn’t a fancy assembly line setup, no ma’am. It was just me, a couple of execs and a broad understanding of the product goals, with a few vague ideas of how to get there.

It was my job to be boots-on-the-ground and get the thing built while minimizing costs, from beginning to end. To keep costs down for this pilot, direction from the top was to hack a used piece of equipment. The equipment involved solar panel systems and a telescoping pole with a light at the end.

Reader, please note: I have no prior knowledge of solar panel systems or traditional electrical engineering at all (I still barely do). I hadn’t thought about watts, volts and amps in literally a decade. The execs on my team had basic working understanding but were not experts either.

No process, no guidance — what’s a girl to do? If you‘ve ever found yourself in a similar situation, you’ll know it’s mildly panic inducing and comes with a healthy dose of imposter syndrome. When this happens, take a deep breath:

Reminder #1) It’s okay to ask questions. And to ask more after that.

If you’re like me, you’re going to be pretty shy about asking questions — worried your inexperience is going to reflect badly on you with the execs. So instead, I started leaning on external vendors and manufacturers of the equipment we wanted to buy. I kid you not, I spent hours on the phone having them walk me through the calcs or their recommendations.

In a nutshell, try to identify sources of information who could benefit from helping you. Granted, they might try to slap a design/consult fee on you. I do hope your budget allows for this, because they deserve it. Mine didn’t, so I had to balance comparing information and filling gaps from multiple vendors.

The secondary benefit to this is that you gain a really good understanding of their unique capabilities and willingness to accommodate — basically a test run of what a future partnership might look like.

• Takeaway #1: Accept your limitations. Don’t expect yourself to be a subject matter expert when you’re not. You set yourself up for failure and get in your own way when you do. Instead, why not consider your role to be more about daylighting potential issues, rather than solving all the problems? (even when it feels like you’re supposed to). You can avoid the trap of being responsible for solving problems by sharing issues and potential options for solutions and moving the ball back into your boss’ court.
• Takeaway #2: Make a case for folding in subject matter experts on the design team from day one, right from the exploratory, information gathering phase. The right team composition would have made this endeavor less painful and more successful.

Reminder #2: Temperature checks on process and questioning assumptions are not luxuries, they’re mission critical. Does your current trajectory align with information from the field?

The execs purchased a used piece of equipment to hack before I had the time to confirm feasibility of this approach, or make a case for a different approach. Counterintuitively, hacking existing technologyturned out to be super complicated, super fast. These systems we were working with are often-times manufacturer-specific, which landed up requiring a deeper expertise than a typical trade (read: we had to spend more time, money and effort on it than a new piece of equipment). For subsequent efforts, we partnered with manufacturers directly to create customized products matching our specifications.

• Takeaway #3: Stand your ground and create the time and space to zoom out to examine the overall process. Surface the need for alternative approaches if required. Even when there’s a lot of pressure from the top to make decisions and keep moving forward, remind yourself that you don’t know what you don’t know. You’re going to be learning a lot in a short span of time, sprinting towards a quick fix based on assumptions (not learnings) will only create deeper problems later on.
• Takeaway #4: Even though you’re creating a process on the go, make sure you’re two steps ahead in terms of logistics and identifying the who’s/whats/how’s.

#3) Every step of the way may require you to prep like you’re going to war, and you may still be taken by surprise. That’s okay — steep learning curves are your friend.

In my case, I’ve worked in construction so I wasn’t totally new to how complicated building a thing can get. Especially when you’re knee deep in the weeds. Nonetheless, the process of seemingly simple branding decisions for this product took me by surprise. Materials, colors, paint, decals, flags — I had to learn a lot about specific materials and how they could work together or not.

• Takeaway #5: Communication is important. Whether matrixes or physical samples, figure out decision-making tools to help articulate options and critical issues to yourself and the rest of the team. The goal is to surface issues while proactively providing solutions to explore.

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Cheers! What are some other tips for navigating ambiguity?